Mortality data of the past four years show a wave of deadly cardiovascular and metabolic illness.
From 2020 to 2022, a quarter of a million more Americans over 35 years old succumbed to cardiovascular disease than predicted based on historical trends, according to Bloomberg analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2023, age-adjusted stroke mortality was almost 5% above pre-pandemic levels, according to preliminary data, while rates from deaths related to hypertensive heart disease, rhythm abnormalities, blood clots, diabetes and kidney failure were 15-28% higher. Covid had a muted impact on other common causes of death such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, the data show.
“The cardiometabolic aftereffects of SARS-CoV-2 have been profound, persistent, and peculiar — really peculiar,” said cardiologist Susan Cheng, director of public health research at Cedars-Sinai’s Smidt Heart Institute in Los Angeles.
vaxxed?
Greater immunity and the emergence of less severe variants have since lowered the incidence of deadly complications, but the problem hasn’t gone away. Each coronavirus infection a person experiences, no matter how mild, might be acting like its own cardiovascular risk factor, she said. The longer-term effects are even more mysterious.
Doctors in the article are puzzled about if the cause is because Americans are too fat, or "the lockdowns" (not the hospitals being flooded with sick people for months at a time) caused people to avoid doctors, while noting that the healthcare system itself broke down and has made it harder for people to find care in the first place ever since. Could it be that these "less severe" variants are still causing heart problems? Gosh, maybe, but it's just a big ol' puzzle and no one can be sure of anything yet.
threads on this article are full of people describing the new heart conditions they developed after getting covid.
If you are up to date on covid vaccines you greatly reduce the risk for about 6 months (on average about how long antibodies to covid last post-vaccine or exposure). That greatly reduced risk still seems way too fucking high for something we are going to be continually exposed to.
Two close friends have heart problems post-covid, one of them has required heart surgery twice in two years and keeps getting exposed to covid because no one in the care home he now lives in gives a shit.
We apparently took the all or nothing approach because it's easier and they figured repeatedly exposing everyone to covid would "defang" the virus, when all it's doing is causing covid to mutate 3-4x faster than the flu, and it's killing 3-4x as many people as well, even after the worst is over. It's pretty bleak.